


Thomas

by applecameron



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Amnesia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-19 03:31:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8187958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applecameron/pseuds/applecameron
Summary: "Eventually, they name him Thomas."





	

**Author's Note:**

> Character X has amnesia is a fanfic classic - I had to write it eventually!

He wakes on a gurney, awful lights over his head and a woman bending over him. He jerks but can't get away. 

He was drugged with something and hypothermic in a ditch when they found him, they say. He was lucky to be alive, barefoot and drenched like that, they say. The seizures shouldn't be permanent, they say. 

What's your name, they say. 

Eventually, they name him Thomas. 

* * *

The social worker gets him a part time job at a Goodwill store and the bed at the shelter becomes a placement in some sort of halfway house filled with people that make him nervous, and after that, a small room all his own, with a lock and a bed and a hot plate, in a dirty building, for a pittance. He has nothing to put in the room but himself. 

Thomas takes up wandering, on foot, mostly, throughout New York. He gets lost and then finds himself again, if only it were a metaphor, but it's not. But it brings the feel and touch of the city to him, and after a month or so of wandering, he's learned either he's not a New Yorker originally, or that his memory is so completely gone it will never come back. Not sure which one is easier to endure. He has a few more seizures, one embarrassingly while standing next to a cop at a train station. At least seizing onto a cop means he doesn't get mugged while lying half-conscious on the ground. And the doctor was right: the seizures are definitely tapering off. 

He discovers libraries and explores them, feeding a hunger for at least some kind of knowledge, even if it's not of himself. As soon as he has suitable ID, he gets a library card and checks out stack after stack of books. Learns he likes art, sonnets, architecture, math. When numbers line up there's a simple purity to them. He randomly reads a biography of Albert Einstein and then hunts up a high school textbook to learn about physics and how stars work. Works his way through the math texts without cracking a sweat. Graduates to college textbooks, fascinated by calculus. Wondering where he can go to take a class in this stuff, learn it in proper order. Asks the librarian, who promises to find someone for him to talk to. 

One day he's walking through someplace, not really paying attention, just breathing in and out and moving, wrapped up in his second hand clothes, wondering what time of year is his favorite, things like that, when he stops at a nowhere bar on a nowhere corner, and, turning on his heel, walks in. 

Learns he doesn't like beer very much, or not that beer, but is attracted to pool. There's something about the green baize table that sings to him. The clean lines of the balls in motion. He watches for a while. Two guys play, one youngish, the other older. 

"Gonna watch or gonna play, kid?" 

Tom shrugs. "I don't think I know how." 

He sees the pair exchange a look but doesn't know what it means. That 's his life, right there. Everyone else has a script, people to look at with secret messages passed just by their expression, and he doesn't. Abruptly, he decides he doesn't care. "So, teach me." 

He's up $200 not long after that, even tells the older man, whose name is Mitch, that he's got amnesia. The guy takes it in stride, Tom supposes, just shares a look with the other guy - Dan - and keeps playing. 

Suddenly curious during a lull in play, asks Mitch if pool is the kind of game fathers teach their sons. Maybe it's something his dad taught him. Maybe he has a dad out there somewhere still. The thought makes him forget how lonely being an amnesiac is. 

Mitch looks at him full on for a good minute. "Depends on the father and son, kid." He puts his cue down and the atmosphere suddenly tightens. "Kid, you've got a talent, you seem real sincere with your pitch, so I'm gonna be nice just this once and let you walk out of my bar with your fingers intact." 

"Huh?" 

"Go hustle somewhere else." 

"Hustle?" 

"Stop just repeating me or I'll change my mind." 

Tom's still got the cue in his hand, and is abruptly aware that Dan's edged closer to him, picking up his own cue in the process. 

Realization hits. "That's why you didn't ask." 

Now Mitch looks befuddled. "Ask what?" 

"About the amnesia. Everyone always wants to know if I remember how to drive a car, or how to tie my shoes, and all kinds of…" He makes a hand gesture that encapsulates a variety of possible swear words. "You didn't ask." 

Dan blurts, "Is he for real?" 

Tears suddenly prick at his eyes and he feels a hot rush of shame that he's going to cry in front of this stranger, this stranger Mitch, who seemed welcoming, taught him without laughing at him, this stranger Mitch who thinks he's lying. _I want to go home, but I don't know where it is._

Mitch measures him for a while, as if he'd spoken aloud, then turns away. "Danny," he orders, picking up half the money from the pool table edge, with plump, competent, hands, "the kid and his fingers can keep the rest." 

Tom walks out with a couple hundred bucks in his pocket and makes a point of memorizing the bar so he doesn't follow his feet in there again. 

The next trip to the library he takes a detour from algebra and calculus and reads up on hustling, con men, games of chance versus skill, which devolves into some very exciting reading about statistics and probability that he adds to the list of "things to learn in order", and a movie he could check out from the library if he had a video player. It stays on the shelf, the bright colors and the images of Robert Redford and Paul Newman locked in their plastic cover for eternity. There's also a list of things to understand - stock market crashes and the Great Depression. The stock market looks really interesting, and he starts reading the financial sections of the papers the library carries. He learns that it's just as true on the large scale as it is on the small scale: you need money to make money. So. How can he make some? 

It takes him a couple of months but ultimately, Tom hops a cheap bus to Atlantic City with a little under $300 in his pocket and the resolution to bring back more. But not with a hustle. With numbers. 

Blackjack likes Thomas. Among other things. 

He hits one casino at a time, one game at a time, one table at a time. Slow and small and steady until he's got $400, then $1000 in his hand. Cashes out, and walks to the next casino. Builds up to $4000. It's an invigorating feeling, having money in his pocket. 

He walks out and it's daylight and Tom realizes exactly how deceptive casinos are. You would never know. They're like mazes inside, so you can't get out. Or maybe it's more like pitcher plants. 

He realizes he has a headache and goes in hunt of food, non-alcoholic drink, and aspirin. Maybe even a hotel room. 

By the time he's picking what casino he'll go to to turn his $10K into $20K, Thomas has slept 8 hours, and bought a suit. He doesn't know why, exactly. It's old. "Vintage" is the term. He likes the waistcoat, especially. It makes him look dapper. Like a picture from the 1930s. It feels right. 

He doesn't spend much more time in Atlantic City, there's bound to be men like Mitch he doesn't know how to see yet, lurking somewhere, waiting to break his fingers for perceived trespasses. Comes back with just a touch over $40K, and a second suit, more expensive than the first. He spends good money on a pair of quality shoes, and wears them back on the bus, money tucked into a little backpack that was his very first goodwill purchase, with his own earned money. 

Before tackling the stock market, he makes a side trip. 

Mitch is in a back room, and Tom hopes he's not interrupting some important poker game. 

"You again." Mitch points at him with fingers wrapped around a lit cigar. No Smoking was clearly not a concept known at Mitch's place. 

"Yessir. I came to pay back that loan, with interest." He places a grand in front of Mitch on the table, and then tops it with another. "And to pay up for making me feel normal for a while. Thank you." 

Mitch laughs and plays with his cigar. "Yeah, you're normal all right." 

The air in the room doesn't tighten like it did when his fingers were in danger, but Tom's not sure he knows exactly what Mitch is thinking. 

"Okay, kid." He pulls the money to one side then leans back. "I gotta know. What last name did you pick? Or did you keep that John Doe crap?" 

Tom shrugs. "Smith." 

"Yeah, you're not a Tom Jones." 

Tom smiles at his new shoes. "One of the nurses at the hospital made that same joke." He didn't understand it at the time, of course. 

"Shoulda picked an Italian last name. You got the balls." 

He likes Mitch. Doesn't trust him, really, but likes him. He makes sense, in his own way. "Thanks, Mitch." 

Mitch's eyes keep him pinned for another few seconds. Then he nods, "We're square, kid. Have a nice life." 

He knows he's dismissed. "Yessir. You, too." 

And now the stock market. 

In a little over a month, he's a millionaire. In a little longer, he's a multi-millionaire who lives in a tiny room with a bed and a hot plate. 

Time to make some changes. 

His favorite librarian shows him how to look for a new place, and teaches him that banks have things called safe deposit boxes - good for moderate sums you don't want to declare taxes on - and introduces him to Ann. Ann's a university professor with a daughter who knits, so she's always got a new scarf or shawl, or whatever, as summer turns to autumn. It's Tom's new favorite season, but so far, they all are. 

Tom discovers tailor-made suits, wears his vintage purchase in to meet the guy. 

"Nice piece you picked up, Mr. Smith. Lucky find. It should last you a while with good care." Tom promptly buys a clothing brush. "But let's make you something just for you." 

The first time Thomas is dressed head to toe in things he picked for himself, had made for himself, paid for himself, he experiences a ridiculous degree of joy. Mine, he thinks. 

He and Ann go out together. Ann has long brown hair that she wears in messy buns. One day it makes her look so heartbreakingly familiar he almost cries. Instead, he stands up and makes a stupid excuse, then flees. 

He explains later, and she forgives him. She straightens him out on the order of studying some things. Gives him syllabuses, which help immensely. Tells him about MIT OpenCourseWare. He spends his mornings playing the market, then goes to the library and studies. Then home, usually. Or a play. He finds out he likes plays. When one of Ann's friends, Sara, another professor, takes him to a Broadway musical, he learns they're a seizure risk for him, the hard way. 

Wakes up in an ambulance. At the hospital, the doctors fuss over him and call his social worker, who he hadn't kept in contact with, Sarah, with an 'h', and she's suitably miffed over the move and the fact that he quit Goodwill without saying a word. But he's OK on his own, now, and if he were going to remember things, wouldn't he have by now? 

The only thing he can do is keep moving forward. 

"OK, Tom." She puts a card in his pocket. "But keep that." 

"What is it?" 

"It's the number for a therapist." 

"What can they do for me?" 

"It gives you someone to talk to." 

He doesn't bother. He's got Ann, and Sara, no 'h', who gets over her freakout about his seizure eventually and teaches him show tunes without making him go to live shows. He likes the music, but she won't let him even watch one of the shows on TV without a spotter, even though it's obvious to him it was the lighting at the time. Just in case. Sara's a swimmer. He tries it for himself and takes up laps every other morning. He likes that moment of free fall right before hitting the water. 

Sara introduces him to Peter, a grad student in economics. Peter is lean and compact, like Tom, and intense, and they never seem to run out of things to talk about. 

They don't kiss. They never kiss. Thomas doesn't know if he likes men, or women, or some mysterious third option. Peter is gentle with him about it. 

Ann laughs at him one evening, glass in hand. "You know, you've got money, you could just enroll somewhere as a special student, even if you don't know whether you want an undergraduate or graduate degree." 

Tom's still thinking about that when Ann takes him as her date to a few faculty parties, and he describes some of his ideas about how to model a market to someone whose name escapes him, over a vodka tonic that he never even sips. Who gestures to a friend to come join them. They debate, passionately, for the rest of the evening, drinks and host completely ignored. 

He's enrolled as a special part-time student at Stern NYU within another month. 

It's great. 

* * *

A man stops him outside his apartment. He claims to work for the CEO of Proclus, in Japan. There are people who want to meet him. 

The next day, Tom makes his way to a very expensive hotel downtown. 

When he sees the man who stopped him on the street, Tom barely notices. He's too busy, looking at the other man. The man is introduced to him as _Eames_. Eames, who is broad and fit and strong and somehow sad, who can't take his eyes off Tom. 

The feeling is entirely mutual. 

They talk. It's not a job interview, or, if it is, Tom can't tell for what kind of job. Besides, Eames never tells him what he does for Proclus, or if he even works for Proclus at all. But he knows Mr. Saito well, that's clear. And Eames says Saito thinks he knows _him_. 

"How? Why?" 

"Come up to my room, won't you, so we can do this privately." 

It's just them, in the elevator. Tom and this Eames who is so witty, so entrancing, and with such an undercurrent of sadness in him, some loss he was restructuring himself around, even now. 

This Eames, who makes him want to tease. He doesn't know why. It's a long enough elevator ride that he quips, "You _do_ have a room at this hotel, don't you, Mr. Eames?" 

"Indeed I do." And the man angles his head down to catch Thomas' mouth still open. 

Thomas learns two things very quickly. First, that he is gay, or bisexual, or pansexual, or something other than anyone's presumptive heterosexual. Second, this man Eames is the man he wants desperately to be other than heterosexual with. Eames kisses him thoroughly, expertly, hand cradling his head and neck as if he's afraid Tom will duck. Tongue along the roof of his mouth while a thumb strokes his Adam's apple and he's moaning, hopelessly turned on, and the next thing he knows one leg is trapped between Eames' and he's holding on to the man for dear life, trying to climb into him, or dissolve, or anything that makes them more together. 

And then it all comes to a screeching halt as Eames pulls back, "sorry, pet, I know you're not him," and he's breathing heavy and looking anywhere but Tom in the eye. There's this choking sound in his voice that makes Tom's heart skip a beat. 

"Look, if you stop like that again I'll kill you with a butter knife." 

Eames is laughing at that, laughing and angry or crying, he's not sure, "I've missed you so much," he says again, voice still cracking, so Tom just dives into him. 

"I know this." He presses their lips together, tugs at Eames' hands, their perfect texture, shape, agility. "Please. I know these hands." It's the first thing he's recognized at all and it's this man's lips and hands on his face, his body. Eames mouth is opening under his assault. "I know these hands." And now he's the one with tears on his cheek. 

And they just kiss, Eames' hands on him, while the elevator rises, and it feels like forever. Just. As if kissing was ever just 'just'. Tom climbs up him and Eames takes the weight, clearly accustomed to it, pressing them both to the wall. 

This is the man he loves, the man he sleeps with, the man he apparently threatens regularly about sex and he feels like he's going to explode, because he may not know himself but he knows these hands. He knows these hands, these lips, Eames' cologne. He knows them. 

If he knows these hands he can know other things, too. 

That's the last truly lucid thought he intends to have for a long time. 

Eames has carried them the 10 feet to the door but has to disengage slightly to unlock it. Tom drops to the floor and mostly backs in without looking, hand on Eames' tie and the other reaching for his belt, and then everything comes to a screeching halt again. He's only been alive for a year or so, personal time, but there's two other people in the room and that is not what he expected. One is a tiny woman with both hands clapped over her mouth and the other, a man with his blond hair combed back, looks angry enough to kill. He roars, "Eames! Christ, you seduced him? He doesn't even know you!" He reaches like he wants to grab Tom and pull him away. 

The tiny beauty looks like she's going to cry. 

All the blood in Tom's head keeps rushing other places instead of staying where it belongs, but one thing is crystal clear: "I do know him." 

Whoever the woman is screams "Arthur" and runs to him only to stop when he sidesteps and says, "I just don't know why." 

He turns to Eames, who looks utterly undone. "I know you." He puts his hands in the air, sketching something he can't name. "I know what the sun looks like on your face. I love you in the sun, do I tell you that?" 

Eames nods at him. "Really?" Nods again. "It's your profile. It's perfect." Tom keeps going, it's like something pouring out of him, things he doesn't know until he summons them from the void, like Creation. "You have tattoos. They're there, I know it. I don't know what. But they're there. And you -- Oh, you don't wear suits like this one except if you have to for work." He's touching him but not touching him, hands hovering, drawing, and Eames is watching him, spellbound. "I know you. You drink in public but never at home." It's like the whole world is narrowing to just them. The two strangers behind him are silent. He doesn't know or care if they're even still in the room. Eames is what matters. Eames who he knows and _knows him back_. 

Eames is smiling, still sad but smiling, with those plush lips that should be pressed against his, and he steps closer, into the circle of those hands he wants to never, ever leave. They're the same height. Whispers into his neck, "I don't know anything, _anything_. I know you." Inhales and starts laughing himself, stepping back to look at this man who he is crazy to love, but loves. Whose hands are where they belong, stroking Tom's sides lightly, eyes dark with intent. "I know your cologne. It's something you buy in some place with a, a French name? Is it _in_ France?" He puts his hand to his own head because that's where all the blood is now, it's like he's untethered, he's going to float away, amongst all these sparks rising up inside him, and then he hears three people say "shit" in unison, one right in his ear, as his knees go and Eames catches him. 

The hotel is 5-star, so yes, there is a doctor to come to the room because Mr. Kingsley's guest became faint. 

He's feeling better before the doctor even arrives. It's Eames who removes his shoes and loosens his tie for him, removing it and rolling it up into a tidy packet to slip into the pocket of his overcoat, now draped over a chair. Tom's on the bed, alone. Cobb - the blond man, they're finally introduced and he is still angry - is in a chair as far away as he can get. Ariadne is the fourth of their strange party. She sits to one side of the bed in a chair while Eames eventually perches on the mattress with one knee up, fingers tapping his shoe. It's a very comfortable bed. He's dismayed that his pleasure at Eames' presence on it with him is more intellectual just that moment than carnal. 

It's Eames who answers the door for the doctor, even though Cobb is probably closest. Tom doesn't enjoy telling the doctor he's a bona fide amnesiac with occasional seizures, and that he's meeting with investigators trying to find his family. It's an excellent lie. So excellent, it's actually the truth. It's just that apparently they're the family he was looking for. 

And he hasn't had a seizure in months, thought they were done, actually. Explains that to his hosts, and then the doc, who asks pertinent questions and suggests he take a room at the hotel rather than go home, and he can follow up in the morning. 

Eames nods. "He'll stay here." Cobb just looks at him. 

Seizures make him tired for a while but don't knock him out, so he just watches, listens, to Cobb and Ariadne talk about some piece of equipment, looking at him periodically. It sound like they want to use it on him. Eames just stays close, contemplative, not touching him until Tom reaches out, puts his hand in his. 

"My name's Arthur?" 

Eames runs his thumb along Tom's wrist. Smiles. 

He shuts his eyes. 

Opens them later and the room is dim. Eames is laying on his side on the bed, back to him and jacket draped over him like a blanket. The blanket, it seems, was reserved for Tom, unfolded just enough to cover him neatly. Ariadne is gone. Cobb is still in his chair, leaning back, arms folded under a leather jacket. He moves when Tom raises his hand. Comes over and kneels. "Feeling better?" It's a whisper pitched to keep just to the two of them. 

"Yeah, sorry." He struggles to lift himself up without waking Eames. 

Cobb reaches for water, puts it in Tom's hand, wraps his fingers around the glass, then reclaims it after Tom drinks. 

"You know me really well, don't you." It's not really a question. It's the only possible reason for his anger. 

"Yeah. We haven't spent much time together recently." 

"Is that because of Eames?" 

"Christ, no. I'm sorry, Ar- Tom. Eames…Eames makes a hobby of being outrageous. I was already upset. I took it out on him." He looked down at his hands. "Hearing you might be alive was a shock. Seeing you..." 

"Because I don't recognize you." 

"Yeah. That, too." He looks back up. "The four of us went through hell together, you and I especially. Together." He looks at anything but Tom. "You kept me sane. We thought you were dead, and you're in New York. Going to grad school. I could've gotten on a plane anytime to see you." 

"Where?" 

He hesitates a beat. "You've been there. Do you remember anything?" 

Tom shakes his head. "Not your face. No places. Just the way you talk. Um. Cadence." He waves his hand. "It's like Eames. I know it. But there's no…" 

"Context." They just look at each other for a bit. "California." 

Tom thinks about it. Shakes his head. 

"Look. There's something that may help. I want to talk to a couple of colleagues about hooking you up, first. See what they think about the seizures." 

"It's a …" He has to rummage for a while to come up with terms. "diagnostic tool?" 

"That's one of its uses." 

* * *

He finds out he speaks French because Ariadne plays something in French for him the next day and he understands it. Recognizes it. Summons up Edith Piaf from the void of his mind. Tom goes to sleep that night playing a French radio station on his computer. 

Eames is silent, and respectful, which is not exactly what Tom wants, but he understands, sort of. 

* * *

They meet in the hotel room again, so Tom can talk to someone Dom knows via Skype. His name is Miles. 

As soon as Miles begins speaking Tom recognizes he is listening to a lifelong academic. "Dreamshare, via this device and corresponding drugs, allows persons to enter a shared dreamspace as dreamers. Lucid dreamers are able to affect their dream environment by will. You can enter iterative dreamspaces from within the initial space; each nested dream has a different durational experience. Seconds at one level corresponding to minutes or hours, or even longer, at a deeper level. An architect can create environments in the dream to allow for complex interactions for a variety of purposes, therapeutic or otherwise." 

"This is incredible." 

"Well." Miles clears his throat. "It was originally developed by private defense contractors for the U.S. military, for training purposes. Not unlike virtual reality simulators." Tom can actually see the moment where Miles thinks of something a way he hadn't before. "But really, it's not well suited for the job, because dreams, in the end, are influenced by the dreamer's subconscious, and therefore not necessarily simulations of reality even though they feel real during the experience. The host dreamer's subconscious generally fights intrusion as well. Worse, once that dreamer or any other dreamer in a dream is lucid, the goal of creating a simulated scenario for training purposes is undermined because of their knowledge it is a simulation." He gets back on track. "Its uses today outside that military training context are not illegal per se, but extralegal. Unregulated." 

Clues are drifting around Tom like feathers. 

"I am an experienced dreamer?" 

"Very." 

* * *

They take him under. It's amazing. 

Nothing changes. 

Eames just walks out of the room, after, not saying anything. 

Later, Cobb and Eames are having a conversation Tom doesn't understand at all. "We could show him a projection of himself." Eames shakes his head. "It's a projection and inherently flawed." "Flawed?" "All right, incomplete, then. What will it get you? Does the projection interact with him, with us? What is that triggering for him." "Well, what if you forge him?" "You want to try another inception, Cobb, is that it? What message are we planting? Wake up?" 

Ariadne has been watching them from the sidelines, and cuts incisively across them. "We don't understand enough about the why of his amnesia, to be able to deconstruct it." 

Dom just looks at her for a while. "Interesting word choice. What if it's a constructed block by someone else?" 

Everyone's quiet. "Is that even possible?" 

"Anything's possible, poppet." Eames tells her. 

* * *

"Tell me about Arthur," he says. 

Ariadne does. _Her_ Arthur introduced her to dreamshare. Is passing friends with Miles, though more the age to be one of his proteges, she's not sure of the backstory between them. Taught her about dream mazes, invented slipstreams - twists in the architecture to connect far-off points - dresses really well, loves Paris or used to, before Dom's wife Mallorie died. Likes Algerian sweets and French New Wave films. 

With Dom, he hits the motherlode of information. _His_ Arthur was kidnapped by his father as a very young child and moved to the United States. Has no idea who his mother is, she's somewhere in Canada, most likely. Knows his "old name" is Samuel, but has no surname that goes with it. Likes to run. Was in ROTC in high school. Went to Penn State. Dom said they met while Arthur was in the Navy, during the military's dreamshare program, but he's not in the military anymore. He's a private contractor. 

Dom tells him he's the model for something called a militarized subconscious, because his was natively partly militarized already. 

Tom has no idea what to make of any of it, other than the medical speculation over extended Somnacin - the name of the main dreamshare drug - use on the body. Arthur has spent more time in dreamshare than possibly any other human being involved in the U.S. program. Dom tells him the UK got their hands on the tech relatively quickly, which is when Eames got involved. Dom tells him Eames' military affiliation was always a bit murky, and Dom had assumed he was some sort of intelligence officer for the British Army, or some other intelligence service. 

Dom tells him there aren't many active experimental participants around anymore. Arthur, it seems is one of the few surviving guinea pigs from the "early days". Basically, when he dies, it sounds like there's a bunch of military doctors who'll fight for the privilege of dissecting him. 

Tom decides Arthur certainly has an interesting backstory. None of it triggers anything, no dramatic cascade of memory sweeping through him and obliterating any reason for Eames to watch him with sad eyes. To not want to touch him, though he yearns for it. 

He doesn't ask Eames about his version of Arthur. 

* * *

Things Tom learns: 

When Arthur went missing he was engaged in set-up for a dreamshare job in either Canada or the U.S. 

It might've been a pro bono job - a favor for a law enforcement contact. Trafficking - of either drugs or people or both - was involved. 

When Tom was discovered, he was half-dead in a ditch in upstate New York, concussed, hypothermic, with a bloodstream full of unknown drugs. 

"How did you get my medical records from the hospital in Albany?" 

Dom just looks at Eames, then back at Tom. "Very easily," he says, finally. 

Arthur loved Eames. 

Tom wants Eames. 

* * *

He stays away for a couple days. They don't' need him as they argue over whatever it is they're arguing over. He focuses on his own stuff for a bit. Tells Ann he's been talking to investigators trying to find out who he is. She assumes they're investigators he's hired, but that's all right. Goes to class. He needs the time to think. 

To be honest, it's more than a couple days. 

He sees Eames, in the early morning one day, waiting for him when he comes back from a run. Or, he assumes Eames is waiting for him. His stomach knots. 

"Let's walk," Eames says, rising. "A runner can always use more cool-down." 

They walk a couple blocks, nowhere in particular. 

Finally, Tom cracks. "What is it?" 

Eames turns to face him, jams his hands in his pockets. "Do you want to stay Tom?" He hurries on, as if afraid of what he's saying, "you've managed to get out of the life completely. Arthur's presumed dead. No one knows where you are. You've got a life, here." He reaches out for Tom's hair, loose without product in it yet. "You could stay out." 

All the things inside Tom war for a while, and he guesses if he says 'yes', Eames will disappear, like smoke, the hotel room they'd been using would miraculously be empty and bland within the hour. And Tom would never see him again. 

"I want you back," he says, finally. "So, no, thanks." 

The look of relief on Eames' face is exquisite, painful, and joyous, all at once. 

* * *

The way Eames categorically vetoes certain drugs, and an apparently wild suggestion regarding something called ECT that Tom means to look up later, make it clear he has intimate knowledge of them as a patient. It occurs to him, to ask Dom - fount of information that he was about Arthur's backstory - about Eames. 

Dom squints at him over his coffee cup. "You met - we all met - via the dreamshare program. I can only tell you rumors, really." Dom traces something on the tabletop in the hotel cafe. "Arthur knows him best." 

Tom learns Eames was rumored to be from old money, presumed an aristocrat, had been institutionalized early in his life for reasons that might have had nothing to do with mental illness and everything to do with old money covering something up, sported a murky military past - the other British soldiers in the program were suspicious of his bona fides - and was natively militarized in a completely different way from Arthur, which meant they got run though a lot of the same proverbial (and sometimes literal) mazes in the dreamshare program. That he was what the dreamshare community referred to as a forger, able to change his appearance in dreams. 

Then he learns that Dom's Eames likes to appear lazy, enjoys traditional British sweets over French pastry, likes spicy food and equatorial countries, speaks Arabic and Swahili and Dom isn't sure what else, enjoys traveling by train, and once spent a summer working as a puppeteer for some kind of children's theatre, and even now no one knows if it was a real job or part of a con. 

* * *

Dom has someone extract an alarming amount of blood from Tom's arm to send it off to various places for testing. 

No one says it out loud, but it's obvious: Tom may never get to meet Arthur. Whatever it was that made Arthur disappear, if it didn't go away on it's own, there probably wasn't much any of them could do about it. 

He and Ariadne begin to form a new friendship. She's an architect by training, and an occasional dreamshare criminal. Dom's what's called an extractor, and generally considered retired to a purely scholarly life. 

And then there is Eames. Who he wants so much Tom fists his cock in the early morning to the very idea of Eames' lips. 

* * *

The blood tests say Tom was drugged with something maybe related to MDMA, which seems to be interacting with the residual Somnacin in his tissues in an unpredictable way, but that both are gradually easing out of his system. 

* * *

Time, relentless and cruel, passes. 

Dom goes home. (California.) 

Ariadne goes home. (France.) 

Eames, however. Eames stays, rents a studio somewhere, and meets Tom for lunch, and sometimes dinner, and doesn't press. 

Tom waits to see what happens when all these weird drugs are gone. Who will he be then? 

* * *

One day, he wakes up, and he's Arthur and Tom at the same time. _Holy fucking weird drug interactions I don't believe that was actually the answer Goddammit shit EAMES -_ " 

He grabs the phone. 

* * *

Things Arthur learns: 

Tom's choice in graduate schools was really…well, excellent, actually. He thinks he'll stay for a bit. It's refreshing to be an academic again. Tom's a great cover identity completely disconnected from every other he's ever had (largely crafted by Eames). Besides, no dreamshare until he's sure there's no more seizures. 

Eames. He learns Eames, all over again, from top to bottom, stem to stern, with his hands, his mouth, his tongue, the way their heartbeats mesh together with their fingers, their bodies, the way Eames cries in his bed and Arthur holds him and whispers _sorry_ over and over, even though it's no one's fault except the human traffickers who believed Arthur's cover story too well and tried to take him from his hostel in Toronto and sell him to a stranger even though he already belonged to Eames. 

Eames holds him tight, at night. Arthur holds him back.


End file.
